Gracie's shoes

Okay, once I tried to put shoes on Grace. They lasted about thirty seconds before she abruptly kicked them off. Lesson learned, newborns don't care for shoes, I guess they prefer to be footloose and fancy free! A couple of our friends gave us some ballet slippers for Grace at her memorial services and we put them at her grave site. I think she is wearing them and definitely dancing with angels. We visited her yesterday and noticed that someone else had been there this past week, we don't know who, but they left a very sweet angel ornament and a couple of roses. If that person is following this blog, we thank you for your random act of kindness. This week, I do believe our angel worked her magic once again. Let me tell you what a lesson Grace has taught us.

These past few weeks Brien has been working very diligently at planning a perfect memorial marker for Grace. I am very thankful that he has taken the lead on designing such a wonderful tribute for our baby girl. The first thing he did was to measure the other markers in the garden of angels to figure out what size we needed for hers. We noticed that there were a few markers there that were bigger than the others and, of course, we wanted Grace's to be as big as possible so we compared these to the cemetery's guidelines for size. They were slightly larger than what the guidelines stated so Brien called the cemetery director to confirm that the size we wanted was going to be alright. The director stated that the families who had the bigger markers unfortunately had not been given the size guidelines ahead of time, and we absolutely had to adhere to the guidelines given. This was very upsetting to us, we thought, why can't Grace's memorial be just as big and special as some of the others? Brien was fired up and his passion for this got me fired up as well. Our next step was to attend the board meeting for the cemetery and plead our case.

Well, we never got that far. Brien came to me that evening and said he had a change of heart. He thought of how the other children's families might feel coming to the site and seeing that her marker was bigger than most of the others. Right now, there are no other children that are right next to her site, however, in the future, the grim reality is that there will be others. Imagine a child who was laid to rest next to her and their family seeing that they didn't have as much space as Grace. How would we feel if we were that child's parents? We immediately decided that we could make her marker just as special and as beautiful as we wanted it to be and still adhere to the cemetery's guidelines. I have been thinking about this all week and about how amazed I am at my husband's realization that we need to be gracious about this matter. He is truly the most unselfish person that I know and he is teaching me to be a better person. That's just one of an endless number of reasons why I love him so very much.

So, this week, for Grace, take a walk in someone else's shoes. Before you react to some situation that seems to outrage you, take a moment and put on the shoes of another. You may just see things in a different light and decide that the new shoes fit just fine.